Albert Gleizes Biography | Oil Painting Reproductions

12-8-1881 Paris, FRA - 6- 23-1953 Avignon, FRA

Albert Gleizes was the nephew of Léon Comerre, a successful portrait painter who won the 1875 Prix de Rome. After completing his secondary schooling, Gleizes put in four years with the 72nd Infantry Regiment of the French army. In 1901, after completing his active military service, Gleizes began to teach himself how to paint in the Impressionist style and to pursue a career as a painter.

About a year after his self-study in painting began, Gleizes was just twenty-one years old when his work titled La Seine à Asnières was exhibited at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1902.

Starting around 1907 his work evolved into a Post-Impressionist style with strong Naturalist and Symbolist components but, from 1909 onward, Albert Gleizes changes his style and was involved with Cubism, both as an artist and principal theorist of the movement. Gleizes then exhibited at the 1910 Salon d'Automne with some Cubist artists, this was followed by his first organized group showing by Cubists, together with Metzinger, Delaunay, Le Fauconnier and Léger. The outcome was an embarrassment and a public scandal which brought Cubism for the first time to the attention of the general public.

In 1913, Gleizes and other artists traveled to America to introduce the new Cubism style of European Modern Art to an American public at the famous Armory Show in New York City and then in Chicago and Boston. Discharged from the military in the fall of 1915, Gleizes and his new wife, Juliette Roche, moved to New York, where they would befriend and meet regularly with trending Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Jean Crotti.

Albert Gleizes never stopped to call himself a Cubist and a Cubist he remained. In many ways, his theories were close to those of Mondrian. His works from the late 1920s through the 1940s looked like nothing else that was being done, and they were seldom found in the art world because Gleizes removed himself from extensive participation in the Parisian art scene.

Before World War II, the American art connoisseur Peggy Guggenheim bought a lot of the new art in Paris including works by Albert Gleizes, which today forms part of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. During World War II, Gleizes and his wife remained in France under the German occupation. In 2010, Le Chemin Paysage a Meudon sold for $2,700,000 at auction in London.